A lot of people believe we are made up of habits and attitudes. Which is quite true considering our brains start constructing habits the moment we are born. Not just humans but also all other animal brains in general collect information every moment we breathe. It doesn’t matter if the organism is awake or asleep. These informations help us react to situations day by day which eventually forms habits that we do without even thinking, turning some new action we just learned into a robotic response that is very hard to get rid of.
So what are these habits we are talking about here? Habit is shortly referred to as an automatic response or practice to a specific situation. Which explains how habits are formed. Brain collects information about new-old experiences and comes up with the most perfect way to react. After a while that response becomes that person’s norm. Some say habits shape your identity, some say habits can be built and broken on purpose, some completely see them as something that people are not in charge of. However, overall everyone agrees on how habits not only construct a set of behaviours but also a life. Think of it like a chain which grows every second. An action being a consequence of another action and that another action resulting in another response… This chain lasts day by day, month by month, year by year until your brain is unable to function anymore. Eventually this continuing chain ends up being that person’s life. We said habits are formed with experiences and aren’t experiences life themselves anyways?
Habits can come in our life as destructive, offensive, productive, fun and any way that can be imagined because we don’t just have experiences in one way. This results in the division of habits as bad habits and good habits. Meanwhile bad habits can be powerful enough to destroy a whole life, good habits can also make a life worth speaking of in history. This just proves how powerful these habits we are talking about here. People think drug abusers, binge eaters, binge drinkers are all people that lack willpower. However, that’s not true. These people develop these habits through certain situations. It becomes their response to pain and sadness. The longer they perform this response the harder it gets for them to get out of it. They get stuck in that chain and the habit consumes their lives. The scariest part is they never know how powerful that repeated reaction they give to certain situations is in the beginning. Warren Buffet explains this by saying: “The chains of habits are too light to be felt until they are too heavy to be broken.”
As we said, habits can be bad or good. They can also be small or big. However, what all these routines have in common is that they get stronger in time. Choosing habits that’ll contribute to you and getting rid of bad ones as fast as possible is so important because the more you get stuck in that life chain you’ll realize that you don’t control your habits and responses anymore, they control you.